Research Bites Podcast

#32: Labels, Behavior, and the Bigger Picture

• Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB • Episode 32

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In this episode, Dr. Kristina Spaulding dives into the complex world of labels—how we define, categorize, and talk about behavior in both humans and animals. Drawing on her psychology background, she explores the benefits and pitfalls of labels, the messiness behind mental health classifications, and how new models in psychology might help us think differently about animal behavior. At the heart of the discussion: lasting change comes from addressing underlying processes—like stress, emotional regulation, and impulsivity—rather than focusing only on behaviors. If you’ve ever wondered how labels shape your work—or how to use them more effectively—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Whether you’re a trainer, behavior consultant, vet, or science-curious animal lover, you’ll come away with a richer, more nuanced view of how labels shape our understanding—and results.

Links & Resources:
Unlocking Resilience:  https://sciencemattersllc.com/unlocking-resilience

First, M. B., Rebello, T. J., Keeley, J. W., Bhargava, R., Dai, Y., Kulygina, M., ... & Reed, G. M. (2018). Do mental health professionals use diagnostic classifications the way we think they do? A global survey. World Psychiatry, 17(2), 187-195.

Maj, M. (2018). Why the clinical utility of diagnostic categories in psychiatry is intrinsically limited and how we can use new approaches to complement them. World Psychiatry, 17(2), 121–122. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20512

Nasrallah, H. A. (2021). Re-Inventing the Dsm as A Transdiagnostic Model: Psychiatric Disorders Are Extensively Interconnected. Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 33(3), 148–150. https://doi.org/10.12788/acp.0037



 

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome. I'm Dr. Kristina Spalding, and this is the Research Bys Podcast brought to you by Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior. We foster conversations about science and its application to animal training and behavior. In an effort to improve wellbeing for animals and the people they live with, please enjoy geeking out about the science of behavior.

Hello. Before we start today, I want to tell you about my next class. Even if you've got the skills, the passion, and the experience, you may still feel stuck or overwhelmed, especially with complex cases. It's time to combat that burnout and go deeper. Unlocking resilience isn't just another CE course.

It's a transformational program that explores how stress [00:01:00] impacts dogs and how to build true resilience from the bottom up, you'll connect the dots between stress, behavior, emotion, cognition, neurobiology, and resilience and welfare, and gain a comprehensive foundation that goes far beyond the basics.

You'll leave feeling more inspired, confident, and equipped to support dogs and their guardians with clarity, compassion, and science backed practice. The next cohort starts on August 18th. Head to Science Matters llc.com. That's Science Matters llc.com. Or grab the link in the show notes to enroll. Come geek out about science with me.

Research Bites: Hello and welcome back to the Research Bytes podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing my thoughts with you on labels and how we approach the [00:02:00] categorization of behavior. Before I get into that, I do wanna talk just a little bit about my background so that you understand where I'm coming from and because I will be talking about mental health diagnosis in humans today.

In addition to working with dogs for 25 years, I have a PhD in bio-psychology, which is the biological basis of behavior. And even though I got that PhD to study animal behavior, I actually completed it in a human psychology program, which means that all of my classes were focused on human behavior. And so I have graduate level training in mental health disorders in humans.

That does not mean to be clear that I have any qualifications or credentials for diagnosing or treating mental health disorders in individuals, but I do understand the, academics behind what they [00:03:00] are, how they develop, how they impact behavior, and how we think about them. So now that I have covered that.

Let's go back to talking about labels themselves. If you have been in the field for any length of time, you know that labels are controversial and I wanted to weigh in with my thoughts on labeling and the classification of behavior. Spoiler alert, I'm going to follow my usual mantra of, it depends, it's complicated and we need more research, but I will of course go into much more detail than that.

So first of all. I do believe that well-defined labels can be useful. A key word there, being well-defined. They're not well-defined, then that can lead to a lot of problems. But when they're well defined, they can lead to a shared shorthand for communicating with other professionals, and they can streamline those discussions when we're talking about things like cases and research, they can also help us find.

[00:04:00] Research and interventions related to specific categories of behaviors such as separation, anxiety, or aggression. At the same time, they can be problematic, especially when we're using them with clients and or the public. This issue is exacerbated when they are not being defined or they are not being clearly defined.

But even if they are preexisting, knowledge and judgments associated with labels can lead to confusion. When the clients or the public's perceptions and definitions are different from our own, they can lead to people feeling like they or their animals are being judged. And they can suggest a level of permanence that is likely not there in the sense that instead of labeling behaviors, we're actually labeling, unchanging trait of [00:05:00] that animal.

And these benefits and challenges are true in human mental health disorders too. When we're looking at people. There are two documents that play a very important role in the diagnosis of mental health disorders in humans. The first one is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or the DSM, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, and it outlines classifications and diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders.

That is currently in version five, so you will hear it. Referred to as the DSM five. Previous versions might be the dsm, four, and sometimes you might see a TR attached onto it, which just means text revision. Don't worry about all those details. I just wanna provide some context for people. If you've heard these, these labels or titles [00:06:00] thrown around and are unclear on what they're referring to, the second document is a very similar document.

That is used internationally. That is called the International Classification of Diseases and is published by the World Health Organization and they are currently in version 10. I am going to refer to the DSM because that is the one that I'm most familiar with, but much of what I'm talking about is going to apply to both of them.

So mental health diagnoses are basically labels and the current systems, those that are outlined by the DSM and the ICD have come under increasing scrutiny over the years for the problems with how mental health disorders are categorized and thought of. So just to give you some additional perspective, the World Health Organization conducted a few surveys.

Within the last 10 years of how people use these classification [00:07:00] systems. The lead author on this study was Michael, first at Columbia, and they gave an international survey of over 1700 clinicians and found that people who use the DSM and the ICD rated them or gave them the lowest rating of utility or usefulness for determining.

Treatment and prognosis for individuals. They were rated as much more useful for administrative use, which primarily, at least in the US, has to do with insurance billing as well as speaking with colleagues and teaching. So this is in line with what I was saying earlier is that they, when labels are well-defined, they can be useful for communicating with other professionals.

But I wanna get. Much more deeply in limitations, to put it mildly, of mental health diagnoses under the system that is currently being used. And again, these are basically, I mean, they [00:08:00] are labels. And right now this picture is very, very messy. So when you look at the DSM, there are over 300 diagnoses in there for things like anorexia and.

Multiple different kinds of depression and many, many different kinds of anxiety and, personality disorders and wide variety of, of things that are considered mental health or neurodevelopmental disorders. And so they're placing them into these clear buckets. Basically these, these clear, diagnoses or classifications, and then they have these lists of the criteria.

So if a person displays X, Y, and Z and. C, D and F, then they have this disorder. The problem is that both based on clinical experience, not mine personally, but people who are working clinically in mental health and research, mental health diagnoses or mental health disorders do not fit neatly [00:09:00] into buckets.

And in a little bit, I will be talking about the general term of mental health diagnoses, but for now, I just. Focus on the classification. So as I said, they don't fit neatly into buckets. Why don't they fit neatly into buckets? Well, many mental health diagnoses share symptoms with other mental health diagnoses, and there's also a lot of heterogeneity within the diagnoses.

So what that means is that, you know, person A who's been diagnosed with major depressive disorder may look very different in terms of. How it's impacting their life and how they're functioning and the specific symptoms they have from person B who has also diagnosed with major depressive disorder. So within diagnoses, you see a lot of variation.

Also, many people fit the criteria for more than one diagnosis, so. That can mean that they actually have multiple diagnoses, and this is called [00:10:00] comorbidity and it is very common. However, it could also be that because there are so many symptoms that are shared between these diagnoses, that you're just getting overlap and do they really have two or more diagnoses or is it just shared symptoms among many different diagnoses?

And so it's, it's, it's almost hard to. Avoid this comorbidity. In addition to that, many people don't fit clearly into any category, even though there are over 300 diagnoses in the DSM five. And so those people would be, their official diagnosis would be some version of not otherwise specified, which basically means that.

I think in the newest version of the DSM, that means either that they don't have enough information yet to make a diagnosis, or it means that they have lots of information and that person just doesn't neatly fit into one of the diagnoses. In addition to that [00:11:00] messiness. The diagnoses themselves are also unreliable, so it's not uncommon for a single individual to get different diagnoses from different mental health professionals even in, uh, close succession.

This may not be surprising given everything I just told you about the fact that mental health disorders do not fit neatly into buckets. Also, despite. Massive efforts to do so. Researchers have not been able to find biological markers that are associated with any single DSM category or disorder. So they have looked, for example, oh, can we find this brain difference or this neurotransmitter, or something else that allows us to say this individual has obsessive compulsive disorder.

People have looked very hard for that kind of thing and they have not been able to find it. [00:12:00] Additionally, medications that are used to treat so-called mental health disorders are often inconsistently hopeful within the diagnosis. So again. Person A with major depressive disorder may respond very well to Prozac, whereas person B with major depressive disorder may have been on multiple different antidepressants of multiple different classes and have not responded well to any of them.

And in addition to that, when medications are effective, they're often effective for multiple different diagnoses. Right? So you may be able to use the same drug to treat anxiety obsessive. Generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and major depressive disorder. So that, those are the, that is a long list of problems with the current model that we are using.

Basically this model was developed, but it doesn't actually seem to fit with experience research [00:13:00] experie, and this is why there is a growing call for a change in how we look at mental health disorders. So. Now is what I'm going to touch on the actual term mental health disorder. I, I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time talking about this, but there, along with this pushback on the system of categorization, there's also been increasing pushback on the term disorder.

And I do think this is really complex or complicated. But you know, I, I think what makes it really hard is there's two things that are true at once, right? So one thing that's true is that people who have so-called mental health disorders, and I will also mention. Because I think it matters that I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder as a teenager, and I have basically maintained that diagnosis for several [00:14:00] decades and have also more recently been diagnosed with PTSD as well.

And so in addition to having this academic background, I can also speak to some degree from my personal experiences as well as close family members. So, so mental health disorders, so we call them disorders. However, there's also huge amounts of research to show that basically they are responses to early life stress and trauma.

Does that mean that genetic doesn't, genetics don't matter. No. O and the, what we call symptoms of mental health disorders are also. Symptoms of early life stress and trauma. And if, if you have a very consistent response to going through the experience of early life stress and trauma, so toxic stress and or trauma, and that is a response that is shared by large portions.

I mean the majority of the [00:15:00] population, is it really a disorder? Right. Or is it just that that is how the body responds, early life stress and trauma, and so it's just a normal response given what those individuals have experienced. That is where vast majority of the research is. That is where the clinicians I have spoken with are.

That is what I am. So that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is, it's also true that certain individuals seem to be much more impacted by others, and it's. Interfering with their quality of life and or their ability to function in normal life. And do we then call it a disorder for that reason, or do we not?

I'm not gonna say more about that here, but I do think, given what we're talking about, it's, it's important to put that out there, especially because there is such a stigma attached to mental health when there really shouldn't be given that it's such a normal response to experiencing early life stress and trauma.

It's not that it's [00:16:00] exclusively early life stress, however, early life stress is going to be much more impactful than a similar experience in an adult that didn't experience early life stress. I think I covered that piece of things to the extent that I wanted to. I do not have a better word, uh, than a mental health disorder, so I'm going to use it, but.

I did wanna add that additional perspective before I continue. All right, so there are a few other things that I wanted to add about the problems with the current classification system for these so-called disorders. This is coming from a paper published by Henry Nasra at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

And so he adds several additional points that research has identified. Into question the way we're looking at these classifications. So as I said, the current research is [00:17:00] inconsistent with this concept that mental health falls into distinct categories or buckets, and instead indicates that there is really huge amounts of overlap and intersection.

And by the way, probably, I should have said this earlier, but isn't this podcast supposed to be about dogs and animal behavior? Yes, absolutely. It's about that, and I think that these same challenges that we're seeing in humans also apply in non-human animals based on everything we know so far. It certainly has not been.

I mean, we haven't even scratched the surface of studying this in, in dogs and cats and, and other animals. But what we do know is consistent with what we're seeing in the human research. And so that's why I'm talking about what's going on in the human research because at the very least, I think it helps us [00:18:00] expand how we think about the ways in which we talk about animal behavior.

Okay, so back to Henry NA's paper. So he. Also states as evidence for the overlap in these current categories is that many of the genes that have been identified as playing a role in mental health play a role in multiple different disorders and brain abnormalities that have been associated with mental health disorders are also found across multiple mental health disorders.

So this would be abnormalities, structural abnormalities. As well as abnormalities in brain circuits and networks and function. Also, having any one mental health disorder increases the risk of having other mental health disorders, as well as other medical diagnoses. Some researchers are also talking about this thing called the P factor.

That's P as in [00:19:00] Paul, and several studies have suggested that there's some kind of a shared risk factor for psychopathology, which is why it's called the P factor that increases general risk for mental health disorders rather than specific risks for. Any particular mental health disorder. So if we take all of that together, I think it's a pretty convincing argument that we really need to rethink how we categorize and think about behavior, behavior disorder, behavior issues, whatever word we want to use.

Emotional challenges, poor. Emotional health, et cetera, et cetera. And again, I think that this is likely true in our animals too. So we spend a lot of time in the field thinking about what's going on with this animal, what category do we need to put it in? And it's possible that, I'm not saying we [00:20:00] necessarily need to completely get rid of all aspects of that, but I do think we can expand our thinking.

Find an approach is more effective than what we currently have. Do I have an easy, clear cut answer for you? I do not. However, what I can do is I can share the thinking in the mental health research right now, and then talk a little bit about how I think that applies to the animals that we work with. So because of all of these issues with our current models.

Several researchers have started to propose alternative models and these, uh, criticisms of the d sm and the ICD have been going on for a very long time, but it is really increasing recently. And so there's two models that I'm gonna just briefly introduce you to. They are not the only two, but they're the ones that seem to be most prominent.

The first one is the hierarchical taxonomy of [00:21:00] psychopathology shortened to high top. And this model was developed by a consortium of psychiatrists and psychologists. And I didn't write down in my notes how many there are, but it's a lot. definitely over 50, possibly over 100. I'm gonna be putting, , links to these.

And more information in the show notes, by the way. So if you're looking for that you will have access to that. So there are several paper papers that have been published on this. The primary papers are coming from COT and colleagues, and again, you'll have that in the show notes. So the goal of high top is to use the research that's out there to identify clusters of signs and symptoms that tend to co-occur.

So right now we have these diagnostic categories. And then signs and symptoms aren't placed under them, but this is looking at, is saying, okay, let's take everything we know and use statistics. These are things like factor analyses, [00:22:00] if that's familiar to you at all, to cluster symptoms and behaviors together that tend to occur with each other.

And so by doing this very quantitative modeling. They have identified six levels of this hierarchy, and I'm not gonna go into a huge amount of detail on this because this information is accessible elsewhere, and I also don't wanna overwhelm people. This is just meant to serve as an introduction, but some of the levels, for example, are starting with the behavioral signs and cognitive signs, et cetera.

And then they group those into similar components or traits, and then they further group those into syndromes and so on and so forth. And they go all the way up to what they call the super spectra, which is the P factor. So you have this general P factor, and then it breaks down into more and more finely [00:23:00] detailed categorization from there.

So. A very superficial example would be that you could have a clustering of traits that are related to anxiety. Those are going to then be placed under the sub factor of fear. And that fear sub factor is placed under the spectra of internalizing. So you may have heard of internalizing versus externalizing.

Internalizing tends to be facing. In word anxiety, depression, for example. External is externalizing is more like aggressive behaviors, conduct disorders, things like that. conduct disorders, another label that is very problematic because that's often getting diagnosed and kids that are experiencing or have experienced extremely high levels of toxic stress and trauma.

So, one key point, really important point. The high top [00:24:00] model is that it views psychopathology or mental health disorders along a dimensional scale, meaning that we sort start with normal functioning and then kind of go to the extremes from there, and that each of these traits or symptoms that we're looking at is happening along that dimension as opposed to being dichotomous.

Right? So either you have anxiety or you do not. Well, that just doesn't make sense, right? Even people who have no mental health diagnoses sometimes are going to experience anxiety, and so there's a spectrum there, and each individual person is gonna fall in a different place on that spectrum, and then those who fall closer to the extremes are going to be more likely to be diagnosed with a disorder.

They also assess functioning separately from the level of the traits. So again, you could have really high [00:25:00] anxiety, but if you're very good at coping with it and managing your environment, it probably will not have as huge of a negative impact on your life as someone who also has high anxiety. Doesn't have good coping strategies or doesn't have access to support.

And so one of the things that's nice about High Top is that it allows practitioners to focus their interventions on different levels of that hierarchy. So in dogs that might look something like, for example, addressing a specific behavior that's the signs and symptoms such as barking and lunging on leash.

While also addressing emotional regulation, which would be at a higher level of the hierarchy. To be clear, we do not have anything like this in dogs, so I'm just sort of making it up that emotional dysregulation might be a category, but again, based on my experience and the research, it suggests that emotional dysregulation actually plays a very important and primary role in a lot of mental health disorders and [00:26:00] people.

And in my experience also I think is very important when it comes to dogs. Okay, so that is the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology or high top. The next model that's been developed is the research domain criteria, or RDOC, so I assume that's pronounced rda. This was initiated by the National Institute of Mental Health in recognition that.

The current system doesn't work. Basically, there are several principles of our doc. I'm not going to list them all because about half of them are related directly to research, but I'm going to list the ones that are relevant to what we do. Approach that they have taken is that they're gonna start with what we know about normal neurobiology.

How does normal, again, what exactly does normal mean? That's a separate discussion, but what does typical neurobiology look like for. Behavior and cognitive and emotional processes. Then they use that [00:27:00] information to figure out how disruptions to that normal neurobiology impact health function. And it's not just focused on neuroscience, but it's very heavily based on neuroscience, similar to high top.

They take a dimensional approach. Both between disorders, recognizing that there's a lot of overlap between the current so-called disorders and also between disorders and health. So again, it's a continuum. It's not binary. You, you don't either have a mental health disorder or you do not. I mean, you do in the sense that you may or may not be diagnosed with one, but since the current system of diagnosis is kind of meaningless, I don't, maybe I shouldn't say it quite that strongly, but I mean.

Lemme put it this way, it's not supported by evidence. So whether you wanna say it's meaningless or not, I guess I will leave up to you guys because I do know that they can personally be meaningful to individuals that have those diagnoses and I don't wanna dismiss that. But they're not supported by current evidence.[00:28:00] 

So yeah. So the dimensional approach is being used to replace these discrete categories that are not supported by research, and they also want to have. Assessments that are reliable and valid. So reliable means that they are reliable across time and also in different contexts. And when assessed by different practitioners and valid means that you're actually measuring what you think you're measuring.

The R Doc and the high top are not the only two models out there. Like I said, they are the most prominent ones, so that's why I'm sharing them here. Also, we still need a lot more research on these two proposed frameworks, not to mention the others, to determine how helpful they actually will be in a clinical setting.

And of course, for this audience, those exact frameworks that have been proposed for humans are not going to. Perfectly applied to dogs, right? I do think a lot of the concepts apply or whatever species you work with, but we certainly cannot take what's out there now and just [00:29:00] slap it onto other animals and call it done.

I mean, we can't even do that in humans, right? But I think that they can be helpful in guiding how we think about behavior and its categorization. There is one more thing that I wanna mention before we start to wrap up. And that is a paper that was published by Mario MJ at the University of Campania in Naples, Italy, and he made a really interesting argument that I think is worth talking about.

He states that diagnosis, which basically means placing a particular individual into a specific category, is only part of a two-part process when it comes to addressing mental health disorders. And the second part after that diagnosis has happened is developing a more detailed assessment of that individual and their prognosis, specifically by examining variables within the individual that have [00:30:00] protective or vulnerability.

So part two is once they get the diagnosis, is making a more refined assessment of that individual. In terms of which interventions are best for them and what their prognosis will be. And one of the major parts of that assessment or aspects of that assessment are looking at variables or factors in the individual that are going to contribute to increased resilience or increased vulnerability.

So for dogs. An example might be, is this a dog living in a shelter? Is it on a working farm? Are they in a household that has a lot of resources and commitment to working with the animal? What kind of environment are they in? So that would be an example of variables that might impact the vulnerability or the resilience, of that individual animal and will therefore impact how we approach the case and what the prognosis [00:31:00] is.

I love this perspective because I think this is so much of what we do. I mean, first of all. Unless you're a veterinarian listening to this podcast, you can't actually make the diagnoses themselves. So I spent a fair amount of time talking about categorization, behavior and diagnosis, but we can't actually diagnose.

However, we are working with animals that have diagnoses, right? Whether they have been formalized by a veterinarian or not. There is something going on there, and our piece is looking at that individual and trying to figure out what the risk factors are. And what the specific behavior modification for that individual needs to be and what the prognosis for that individual is, and then making decisions based on all of that.

And so I love this idea that there's this whole second piece that is also very, very important and often gets overlooked. And so for us, that might be something like, maybe this dog has been diagnosed with resource guarding, let's say they did go to a veterinarian and get a diagnosis, and they've been diagnosed with [00:32:00] resource guarding.

Depending on your veterinarian, that may or may not be a diagnosis that they use. That's also a whole different issue that we do right now. But what are the things that might matter when we're looking at the individual case? What about the size of the dog? How much injury is likely to occur? If there is a bite, the age of the dog, where are they in their developmental stage?

How are they behaving in other contexts? Challenges in multiple contexts, or is the dog basically happy and stable, except that they sometimes guard things? What is the severity in terms of the bite history, the number of items that are guarded, the predictability, how close you can get before the object is guarded, or before the dog displays that behavior, the ability to interrupt the behavior, et cetera.

And then, as I already discussed, what is the environment of that dog? Are there kids in the home? Are they working professionals? Is it a very chaotic environment? Are there other animals in the environment that the dog's also guarding from? You know, what else is going [00:33:00] on? And so homage, in addition to talking about part, this part one of diagnosis and part two of individual assessment, also argues that these new frameworks may be particularly useful in this second part, even if they don't end up being useful for classifications.

So in other words, even if the research doesn't play out, that this is the next best system for classification. Approach and thinking may be helpful when we're looking at individual assessment. So where does that land us in terms of how we're using labels? In my personal opinion, and I do wanna be really clear that this is an opinion.

I think it still makes sense to use certain well-defined labels in professional conversations. And when searching for research, especially when we're searching for research, this is basically impossible to avoid because you have to use some kind of keyword search. And I think if we're being careful about definitions, we can also use these labels when having professional conversations.

So imagine if every time you had to have a [00:34:00] conversation with someone, instead of saying aggression, you said something like. Behavior that includes barking, lunging, growling, snapping, and biting. You could say distance increasing behavior. However, not all aggression serves that function. And again, defining aggression specifically.

We won't have time to get into that conversation today either. But my point is that I do think that there is utility in using specific labels sometimes, particularly with professionals. I do think we have to be extremely careful when we're talking to the clients and to the public, and that in many cases we're probably gonna wanna avoid labels in those contexts.

I'm not gonna say. It's never ever gonna make sense to use a label with a client or with the public, but we have to be very cautious about that and think through carefully why we're doing it, what the impacts might be, and what the pros and cons are, and is there a better way to do it. But I [00:35:00] also think we need to look beyond the assigning of those labels and realize that there are different ways that we can think about how we categorize behavior.

So in humans, a lot of this research is realizing that there are these trans diagnostic characteristics, either in brain function or behavior or cognitive processes that seem to transcend these single so-called disorders and are shared among many people who are struggling. So emotional dysregulation is one of those trans diagnostic characteristics.

And so using the high top and the R Doc models can help us think differently about these approaches and hopefully help us come up with more effective approaches. Also, I think it's really important to remember that when we are talking about behavior, it is almost always stress related in some way or another.

Does that mean that you can have a dog. Displaying a [00:36:00] behavior, even something like biting that doesn't have a strong emotional component because someone has accidentally re you know, taught the dog that if you bite me, I'll give you treats or something. I, I mean, no, like that obviously can happen too, but in the vast majority of cases, there's a strong emotional component that is often connected to stress in one way or another.

Particularly if the animal experience toxic stress during development. Then the last piece coming from MJ is not just focusing on that diagnosis or label, but also making sure that we're really thinking carefully about how are we considering these other factors of assessing individual prognosis and intervention?

What plays a role there? What's the process that we're going through to do that and, and how might we be able to refine that process? So. I would argue that when we're looking at the individual in front of us, it is beneficial to focus less on that individual label and more on the [00:37:00] behaviors, but also the underlying processes.

So not just the behaviors, but also what else is going on in the dog, what else is going on emotionally, what else is going on cognitively? And from a stress perspective. So for example, instead of saying. The dog is leash reactive. We could say the dog is barking and loing at other dogs. They're also displaying hypervigilance.

And by taking a history, we can say that this is likely a habitual behavior that the dog is experiencing toxic stress, so overwhelming stress, and that they have an insecure attachment to the guardian. And so there's a relationship problem there that may also be contributing to the behavior. And so overall, what you're seeing.

Is intense emotional responses, poor emotional regulation, and impulsive behavior. Are those things labels too? Yes. They're so, as I said, it's difficult to completely avoid labels and they do [00:38:00] have benefits in some cases. So if we just focus on the. Behavior. Then we are left trying to address the behavior without also thinking about things like the role of habit, decreasing the stress for that individual, improving their ability to cope with stress, which I think is huge.

Increasing emotional regulation or improving emotional regulation and decreasing impulsive behavior. And all of those things are connected. So I don't have time to get into defining each and every one of those things, but I will define emotional regulation. So, emotional regulation is generally viewed as the ability of the animal to shift from one emotion to a more desired emotion.

And if you were having very intense levels of emotion, which may be driven by toxic stress, then. It is going to be more difficult to regulate those emotions because they're more intense. It's harder [00:39:00] to stop a car that's going really, really fast than a car that's going very slowly. Then impulsivity is also often driven by emotional regulation because if you're having very intense emotions that you, that are negative and you really want them to stop, individuals will often engage in impulsive behavior that is not well thought through to try and regulate those emotions.

So addressing those underlying processes I think is just as important, in some cases, more important than addressing the specific behaviors one at a time. Many of the ideas that I talked about in this podcast episode are what my Unlocking Resilience course is built around. So if you think this is interesting, you will probably also be very interested in the Unlocking resilience course.

Stay tuned for more information on that. 

Before you go, if you've ever felt stuck on a case or wished you had more tools to address and [00:40:00] prevent behavior challenges, you're not alone. That's why I created Unlocking Resilience, which is a comprehensive course to help you build clarity and confidence when working with behavior challenges. You'll learn how stress impacts dogs and how to support real emotional change using the latest research on stress and resilience.

Next cohort starts in August of 2025. Head to Science Matters llc com. That's Science matters lc.com or grab the link in the show notes. Let's go deeper and geek out together and transform your practice through science.

Thank you for listening to the Research Bytes podcast. If you enjoyed this content and would like to learn more, please visit www.sciencemattersllc.com. For more information, you can also find the link in the podcast description. The website has information [00:41:00] on upcoming events, as well as my monthly research, webinars, and upcoming courses.

I hope to see you there. Thank you.